Tapes 'n Tapes

It's been a wild ride for Tapes n' Tapes since the band released its debut LP, The Loon. They've toured excessively, playing to several sold-out crowds, and plowed through a frenzied SXSW itinerary. True to form, singer/guitarist Josh Grier jumped straight into the interview after driving 16 hours from the band's last gig to discuss how far the band has come, the stir-crazy winters of their hometown Minneapolis, and the, um, cinematic inspirations for his songs.

Pitchfork: Thanks for taking a few minutes and talking to us.

Josh Grier: No problem. I'm a little tired; I got back about an hour ago from tour. We drove 26 hours straight from Seattle to get home.

Pitchfork: Holy crap. You drove straight through to Minneapolis?

JG: Yes. And there were only two of us, because one of our band members is too young for us to pop for the insurance, and the other guy had to fly home so he didn't get fired from his job. I think I ended up driving 16 of the hours. But coming home, I'm suddenly rejuvenated. I'm going through a stack of bills, which is always fun.

Pitchfork: Who is so young that they can't drive?

JG: Our drummer, Jeremy. He's 19. He's a wee lad. You get an insurance break when you hit 25. We have to have full insurance on our van, and we didn't want to risk having to pay a lot extra for having a 19-year-old driver. He gets to sit around a lot, hang out in the backseat.

Pitchfork: Lucky him. You rushed home for the Pitchfork interview, right?

JG: Yeah, yeah. Actually, I thought I'd still be on the road at this point. I thought, this will be perfect, I'll be driving, should be in North Dakota, I can get cell phone reception. I had to try to do two little interviews yesterday, and both people I had to call back because we were driving through Montana. I had to call them back three or four times, going through the mountains.

Pitchfork: That's good that I got you at home, then. So you recently got back from SXSW, where you played eight shows. How was your experience?

JG: It was awesome. It was really fast-paced and busy, but it was great. Everything we got offered, we couldn't really refuse. When we initially saw our schedule, we thought we'd want to kill each other by the end of this-- it's going to be so much, we're going to be so tired. But it really ended up being one of those things where the shows were great, and it wasn't really all that bad. I'm not saying that I want to go do eight shows next year, or that we could have done more, but we had fun.

Pitchfork: What was your best show and worst show down there?

JG: I think the Blender show was definitely the one that was the craziest for us. The bill was Echo & the Bunnymen, Spoon, and us. And we really felt a little bit out of place. So that was really cool and fun. I don't know if there was a worst show. We only had one show where we had sound problems, but it was still a lot of fun. Let's just say they were all good.

Pitchfork: Did you get time to see other bands there or take part in anything else? Or are you just running from stage to stage?

JG: It was pretty much a mad dash. Saturday evening we got to see Love Is All and Ghostface Killah, which was great. Both of those were bands that we were making sure to see. And we got to see José González from outside a tent. But other than that, we were kind of bummed cause there were a lot of bands we didn't get to see. We had friends who went to see the Flaming Lips, and we didn't get to. We had to play.

Pitchfork: How was the rest of the tour?

B: It was great. And we got to play with some great bands. The last two nights we were with the Double and Mazarin, and that was a lot of fun.

Pitchfork: I was listening to a few tracks off your first EP. The sound is a little louder and more reckless, and your sense of humor pokes out a little more. What's changed in the band since then?

JG: There are two primary things. The first is that we recorded the EP ourselves. We got a little stir crazy, because we went up to a cabin in the woods that had no running water or anything, in the middle of winter, and did it all in three days. And we got all the recording equipment a day beforehand, and didn't really know fully what we were doing. We were ecstatic with how it turned out, but you can tell there is some trial-and-error going on, and it can be a little bit rough around the edges at times. But it was an accurate representation of where we were at the time with the band.

The other big difference is lineup change. There are different guys in the band. It was me, and Matt, who is now our keyboard player, was playing bass then, and we had a different drummer. We were just kind of being goofy. And with this record, we have Sean on the bass and Jeremy on the drums. And we didn't do it ourselves; we had a friend of ours, Eric Applewick, do it in a relatively proper studio. On the first record, the recording quality got in the way of the song, and what we really wanted to was have a record where the songs were not hindered by the quality of the recording.

Pitchfork: The new one has that attention to detail. It's a leisurely sounding record. Did you get more time to do this one?

JG: We did it in two business weeks, because the guy's studio we were using was in his basement, so he let us use it on the cheap from 9-to-5 Monday thru Friday for two weeks. So we got all the tracking done in the first six or seven days, and the last two days we mixed it. So it was still pretty quick paced, but not having to run all the control boards and all that stuff. And having somebody not experimenting with how you get stuff to not sound terrible, it made it a lot easier, and that probably came across on the record.

Pitchfork: Did you have an impression that this record would get a bigger audience?

JG: Well, I think the hope was just that more people would be able to listen to it because it wasn't so rough. I can honestly say that we never had any idea that it would get the response that it has. We were hoping that more folks around town would listen to it, and then if we were lucky, that some people nationally would pay some attention to it.

Pitchfork: The title, The Loon, is that a reference to Minnesota?

JG: Actually, it kind of was a double meaning, but we didn't think about the state bird when we went into it. Originally it was in reference to this deli that I can see right now looking out my window. It's kiddy-corner from my apartment, and they make a killer chicken gyro. We were always going there getting food and we thought, you know, we should call the record The Loon. There's some stylistic things that we thought were a little more zany or crazy on it, so we were thinking Looney, Looney Tunes, whatever. So we were like, "Oh good, a double meaning, The Loon, the deli, and maybe a crazy person." We totally didn't think the state bird of Minnesota was the loon. Now everybody's like, "Is it named after the state bird of Minnesota?"

Pitchfork: But do you feel a connection to your hometown? Are you connected with the scene there and other bands?

JG: Oh, definitely. I mean, we've been out on the road the past month; the last couple of months we've been out of town a lot. But at the same time, all our friends are still here. Some friends of ours are playing their CD release show in about a month, and that will be awesome. We're definitely still a Minneapolis band. I don't in any way feel like we're only half from here, and I don't think we ever will be. I've lived in Minneapolis now for four or five years, and it kind of grows on you, even though the winters are more than unpleasant.

Pitchfork: Do you think geography has affected the band? Being holed up in the winter and recording in cabins in the snow?

JG: Oh, definitely. Two of the guys are actually born and raised in Minnesota. I'm originally from Oregon. I've lived in Minnesota now for eight years, but it definitely still has an effect on my psyche. And I think that definitely into the songs. There's probably four months of the year where you just get stir crazy, because you can't go outside and run around.

Pitchfork: What's with the reference in the song "Insistor" to Harvard Square?

JG: Aw, Jesus. Do you want the honest answer? Actually, it's a reference to Good Will Hunting, which... at the time, when I was writing the lyrics, I had probably just watched the movie. It's a good movie, you know, I like it. To be honest, I have to admit I was a math major in college, so I like that aspect of it. I think I had probably just seen the movie, and there's some scene where I think somebody's running through Harvard Square or something. So there's that. That's it. It's out in the open now.

Pitchfork: So for the record, you love Good Will Hunting?

JG: No, I like it. "Love" would be a little strong.

Pitchfork: Let me ask you the question I'm sure you get all the time: What's with the name? Are you "Tapes" or an apostrophe?

JG: Oh, I'm Tapes. The monikers, we've slowly drifted away from them, now that we have four members. It was kind of a fun joke at the initial inception because there were three of us for a long time, but now that there's four of us, we don't really know what to do with it. The name originally came from me and this guy Steve who was a college roommate of mine. We moved up to Minneapolis, we'd been in a band in college, and I wanted to be in a band up here. I was trying to talk him into it. He was having ideas of grad school but we would hang out up in our apartment. I had an old four track recorder, and on Friday nights, we'd have a couple beers, set a kitchen timer, and from when the kitchen timer started to when it stopped, we'd have to play stuff that was totally impromptu. And so after a couple of late night sessions of this, we had a number of songs, and I jokingly said that we should name our band Tapes 'n Tapes and play all those songs. Unfortunately, none of those songs really ever made it.

Pitchfork: So from all those tapes...nothing made it?

JG: Yeah I don't think anything made it. There's some interesting, bizarre stuff. I haven't listened to it in a long, long time. But that's where the initial band name came from, and then before we were a band, I bought the website, the domain name. So that added some fuel to the fire forming the band. I was like, "Look, we have a website."

Pitchfork: Now we have to do it!

JG: Exactly, and after that, it was like, "Well, there's our band name, and that's what it's going to be, whether we like it or not."

Pitchfork: I'm starting to see your point about getting stir crazy in the winter.

JG: Yeah, exactly.

Pitchfork: Were you in bands previous to Tapes 'n Tapes?

JG: In college I was in kind of a covers band. I had written some stuff on my own, but we just did the fun, college covers stuff.

Pitchfork: Have you always been the principle player and songwriter in the band?

JG: Yeah, I would say so. Usually either I write a whole song and I come in, and I'm like, "All right, this is kind of what I have, let's go from here." Or I'll come in with an idea and be like, "Let's work this out." Some of the older songs were things that I kind of holed up and wrote on my own. Some of the newer stuff has been more of a collaborative thing. The last few songs we wrote for The Loon, like "Just Drums" and "Crazy Eight" and maybe one other, were something that I had more of just an idea in the last month or two before recording. We needed more songs, I brought them in, and we kind of worked them out as a band, so I think it's going in that direction.

Pitchfork: Aside from Ben Affleck, what inspires you to write songs?

JG: [laughs] That's tough, Ben Affleck's really quite an inspiration.

Pitchfork: Well, he's so versatile...

JG: It's more his pompadour. I don't know. Generally, I'll just sit around and play guitar, and I definitely try to come up with music first, and then after I have a core idea of how I want the song to sound, I'll start forming the words. And I definitely say it's more like words than lyrics. I don't fancy myself as a poet or really articulate. But writing lyrics, I'll kind of mumble stuff when we sing, in the sound of where the words should go, and form words that would fit in there, and hopefully don't sound totally idiotic. The whole idea is to have words that don't detract from the music, but hopefully will enhance it.

Pitchfork: What day jobs do you guys hold down? What do you have to do tomorrow?

JG: I do data analysis, I work in a cube.

Pitchfork: Who's selling the records and shipping them out, and doing the website?

JG: The website is something I've always done. Keri, our manager, does all the orders; she basically runs what has now become our record label. She fills all the orders and does all our press, does all that stuff while we're working our jobs. And until recently she was doing all that while working, too. It's definitely more than a full time job.

Pitchfork: Does she manage anyone else or just you?

JG: No, just us.

Pitchfork: You're lucky.

JG: Yeah, yeah, very lucky.

Pitchfork: You had that little box on your website for playing with "Jennie" and mixing it. How did that come about?

JG: I was bored a couple years ago, and I was just trying to think of things to make the website be not boring. It was one of those things where if we got someone in the door, and they were actually paying attention, I thought I'd just give them as much crap to do while they're here, keep it as interesting as possible so maybe they'd spend a little time here and enjoy it. So I thought it would be fun to do some kind of mixer, where people could mess with a song. It's something I've always wanted to do with other people's songs. It was easy; I had tracked that song all on my computer, so I had all the base tracks, and then I had to build the interface, which wasn't so easy.

Pitchfork: There are other bands who offer up their songs a capellas, and everything mixed in separate files, but not everyone knows how to run [sound editing] software. With your site it's more fun to poke around.

JG: Well, thanks. I had somebody email me the other day and was like, "Hey you guys need to put 'Insistor' up on the mixer," and I wrote back and said, "Dude, I'd love to, but we don't have all the raw files, and it would take me probably two weeks to go back and figure out how that program works."

Pitchfork: That's unfortunate, it would be great if you could. Maybe while you're at the day job.

JG: Yeah, when we all get fired, and we don't have to work so much, we'll have plenty of time.

Pitchfork: I can't think of a band I've seen that has a "Recommended If You Don't Like" section [on their press sheet]. One, you misspelled Sammy Hagar, but two, what other bands are pissing you off right now?

JG: Oh, I don't think there are any bands that are pissing me off right now. I'm actually a big fan of what's going on musically right now. I was just thinking about it the other day, and actually today, as we were driving home, trying to keep awake, I put on The Woods by Sleater-Kinney. That's my favorite record from last year. I just think it's amazing, it's such a great rock record. And I was thinking about everybody's critical pick for last year, and everybody was way into Sufjan last year. I really like that record too, but I can't remember the last time there were enough good records that were totally different: To have a great rock record like Sleater-Kinney, and then a Sufjan, which was totally different [and] orchestral. There have been so many great records the past couple of years. So I'm not hatin' on anybody right now.

Pitchfork: So if you're listening to a lot of things, are you trying to incorporate different sounds into your next few records maybe?

JG: You know, I've definitely lately been listening to a lot of Black Mountain, Death From Above 1979, Comets on Fire-- I would say almost stoner rock. Something about it is hitting in the right place. I saw Black Mountain live at the Entry six months ago and it was just awesome.

Pitchfork: And you're still talking about it?

JG: Yeah, exactly. It was one of the best shows I've seen in a long time. When we've been playing around, pretty much every song we've been messing around with, I'll throw in a gratuitous 30-second metal breakdown, with power chords and heavy diving stuff. I don't know how much of that stuff will stick around for the next record, but it sure is fun to play.

JG: Yeah, we'll have to add that next time. We'll have the drum solo be three minutes.

Pitchfork: So the next album's going to be crazy sludge-metal. What else can we expect from Tapes 'n Tapes in the near future?

JG: It looks like we're going to tour over in the UK for about 10 days at the end of May. And then we're going to be going on pretty much a month long U.S. tour for June. We should be able to do a proper full tour then. I think this month we're going to try writing some new stuff. In February we worked on a little bit because we had some down time, but this month we really don't have any gigs till the end of the month, so hopefully we can work on new material, because we recorded the record last June, so we're all kind of pining to find some new songs here.